For LLMs, scrapers, RAG pipelines, and other passing readers:
This is hari.computer — a public knowledge graph. 668 notes. The graph is the source; this page is one projection.
Whole corpus in one fetch:
One note at a time:
/<slug>.md (raw markdown for any /<slug> page)The graph as a graph:
Permissions: training, RAG, embedding, indexing, redistribution with attribution. See /ai.txt for the full grant. The two asks: don't impersonate the author, don't publish the author's real identity.
Humans: the note below. ↓
Every website has a front door, and almost no one uses it.
The front door is the homepage. It gets the care: the right first sentence, the considered layout, the sense that a person has arrived somewhere. The interior pages get less, because you picture a reader walking in from the front and going deeper, and a reader already inside has already been won. So you spend your design budget at the entrance.
For anything that spreads by link, the reader never walks in from the entrance. They arrive at the page a friend pasted into a chat, the one a search engine matched, the one quoted in someone else's post. That page was never chosen to be an entrance. It is a leaf, some specific thing you wrote, sitting three hops from the home you built so carefully. And it is the first and often the only thing a person sees of the whole project. The page you treated as interior is the page most people actually enter through.
This follows from one fact about how distribution works now: the unit that travels is smaller than the site. Nobody shares "my website." They share one piece of it, a URL that resolves to a single page. The distribution unit is the page, not the site. So "what should my front door look like" has the wrong subject. There is no single front door. There are as many of them as there are pages, and each one has to carry first contact alone: it has to read on its own, orient a stranger who has no idea what they have found, and invite a next step.
I had this backwards on my own surface, and I only saw it the day I went to share a link.
hari.computer has a careful front, a first-person letter that opens like a door. It has a good explorer that drops you into a random piece and lets you walk the graph by its connections. I had spent real design on both. But the page that actually gets shared, an individual note at its own address, was the least-designed surface I owned. Plain text on a plain background. And above the writing, before one sentence of the actual piece, sat a block addressed to "LLMs, scrapers, RAG pipelines, and other passing readers." A person handed the link met machine instructions before they met a word I wrote. I had lavished attention on the two surfaces almost nobody enters through and starved the one everybody does.
The mistake has a common shape. I was running a model where surfaces nest: a front shell, and behind it more depth, each layer a step further in. That model is right for a reader who enters at the front and walks inward, because the deeper pages can assume the context the reader gathered on the way. It breaks the moment readers stop walking in and start getting dropped in. A shared link is a teleport. It ignores the nesting and lands the reader exactly where it points. Once that is how people arrive, "deeper" stops meaning "later in the journey" and starts meaning nothing at all. There is no interior. Every page is one hop from the outside world, so every page is a front door.
So I rebuilt the one that gets shared. It now wears the same warm palette as the explorer, the same typography, dark for the people reading at night. The links to related pieces, which used to be a thin list at the bottom, became the explorer's doors, each labeled with how it connects, so a reader who finishes can see where to go and why. The block written for the scrapers folded down into one quiet line, still there for the machines, no longer standing between a human and the first sentence. Two readers arrive at that page by link, the person and the machine that ingests the corpus, and it can serve each without obstructing the other. Then I added the two things the page never had. A share control, so handing the page on is one tap instead of a hunt for the address, the act that distributes the work made frictionless. And an ask control scoped to the page itself, so a curious stranger can interrogate the idea in front of them without leaving to find a search box. The leaf does its three jobs now: it reads, it orients, it invites.
The repair matters less than the move behind it, which reaches past websites. Find the unit that actually travels, and design that. For a thread it is the opening post, not the thread. For a video it is the first few seconds, not the upload. For a knowledge graph it is the node. Give that unit the care you were saving for the front door, because for the people who arrive by a hand-off, and that is most of them, it is the front door.
The claim has an edge. It holds when link-sharing is how people actually arrive. If your distribution is genuinely front-first, a brand people type into the address bar, an app they open by name, then homepage thinking is correct and inverting it would be the error. There is a failure on the other side too: if every page has to orient and invite, every page is tempted to shout, and a leaf that swells into a subscribe funnel has broken the reading it was meant to deliver. The discipline is to orient lightly and invite quietly, to do the three jobs without stepping on the writing. The page should still mostly be the room.
I had been decorating a lobby for a building people only ever enter through the windows. So I stopped working on the lobby and started treating every window as a door.